The computerization of medical records and medical services has opened the door to many IT innovations. This is true particularly in the areas of advanced and accurate text search engines. The importance of accurate results to a doctor and researches searching through medical documents like pathology and radiology reports, admission and discharge documents, nurses notes etc. . . . ) is paramount. As such, it is important to perform the search not only for the right results (say you are looking for lungs disease), it is also important to leave out of the search results documents that show “no pathological findings” in the lungs.
Current search engines find all documents containing specific words or phrases. These searches have high false positive results, i.e. they retrieve many documents that does not contain the required information. The search can also miss important data. The reason is that the search query does not cover all possible expressions of the requested data. However, medical searches require high reliability.
US patent application 2012/0179696 by Charlot et all “System and process for concept tagging and concept retrieval” discloses a system and process for tagging documents in order to facilitate later retrieval. The tagged concepts are well-defined clinical finding. Hence, well-defined clinical findings can be retrieved. However, the definition of clinical findings cannot cover all clinical findings, and therefore the retrieval of clinical findings may skip important information. This patent does note cope with the problem of false positive results, where too many non-relevant results are being retrieved.
Medical search needs to differentiate between findings and no findings—e.g. the difference between the following cases:
there is no parenchymal nodule or pleural effusion
no evidence of parenchymal lesions
there are parenchymal changes
Post-Radiation Changes of the Lung Parenchyma
Doctors and researches need to be able to ask to exclude all cases with no pathological finding, otherwise the system becomes unusable. It is of paramount importance to identify no finding of pathological concepts and tag it as no finding so they can be excluded from the result set, if the user request so. Hence, there is a requirement for a search method that will assure reliable and comprehensive information retrieval.